Map Your Ops Week

The fastest way to find work an agent should take over isn't to start with AI at all. It's to start with your week. Every engagement we run begins with the same request: walk us through a typical week at your firm, from Monday's first email to the notes you're still typing up on Thursday night.

Why a week, not a day

Operations work at an RIA doesn't arrive evenly. Reviews bunch up on certain days, transfers come in waves after a new household signs, and RMD and billing work spikes at certain points in the year. A single day can make a task look small that quietly takes hours across the week. Looking at a whole week gives you a truer picture.

Walk through your week

Pick a normal week from the last month, not your busiest or quietest. Go day by day and write down every piece of operations work anyone at the firm touched, however small. Your sent folder, your calendar, your CRM task list and your custodian portal history are good memory joggers. Most founders are surprised by how much of the list lands on advisors rather than on the ops team.

A typical list looks something like this:

• Writing up notes and action items after client reviews
• Pulling prep together before the next round of meetings
• Re-keying a new household into custodian forms and the advisory agreement
• Checking on ACAT transfers and chasing down the ones that were rejected
• Fixing forms that came back NIGO
• Processing distributions, RMDs, and address or beneficiary changes
• Answering “any news on my transfer?” calls and emails
• Logging calls, emails and life events in the CRM

The test for agent-ready work

Go through your list and mark each task that passes all four checks:

• It happens every week. Frequent tasks add up fastest, and they give the agent plenty of practice.
• It's repetitive. You or your team have done it dozens of times and could do it half asleep.
• It follows the same steps. If you could write the steps on an index card for a new ops associate, an agent can follow them.
• It needs no judgment about a client's money. The task doesn't depend on advice, a trading decision or a call about the relationship. Those stay with your advisors.

Tasks that pass all four are where the return is quick and easy to see. Tasks that fail one check usually aren't off the table forever, but they aren't where you start.

What it looks like by firm type

These are illustrative examples, not a fixed list. Your own week is the real source.

• Solo RIA: the founder is the advisor and the ops team. Meeting notes typed up at night, new households re-keyed by hand, and custodian portals checked between meetings. Hours here come straight out of time with clients or time at home.
• Multi-advisor ensemble: several advisors share one or two operations staff. Each advisor writes notes differently, service requests arrive by email, phone and text, and the CRM is only as current as the busiest advisor's week allows.
• Breakaway team: a team that recently left a wirehouse or broker-dealer, with a long tail of ACAT transfers, NIGO rejections and households asking where their assets are, on top of building new processes from scratch.
• Multi-family office: fewer households, more complexity. Trusts and entities to onboard, meeting prep that pulls from several custodians and reporting tools, and a high bar for what reaches a family and how it's recorded.

Start with one, then add the next

You'll probably find more tasks than you expected, and it's worth ranking three to five candidates by how much time they take. But don't hand them all over at once. Start with the one agent that takes the most time off your week, run it until it's working the way you want, and then add the next. One agent that works well wins back more time than five you're still checking up on, and what you learn from the first (how you like approvals routed, what your CCO wants logged) makes every agent after it faster to set up.

Find your first agent

Tick the tasks your firm does in a typical week. The minute estimates are starting points, so adjust them to match your own week, and the tool will rank the agents that would take them over.